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“When your subject is a radical theme, what kind of film form do we use to present it?”

—Ben Russell

In early April, the Grand Prix of the Cinéma du Réel Festival in Paris was awarded to Direction Action (2024), a film directed by Ben Roussel and Guillaume Cailleau.

Direct Action won the Grand Jury Prize at the Paris Film Festival. (From left: Festival Director Catherine Bizern, Guillaume Caillou, Ben Roussel, simultaneous interpreter) [Photo credit: Paris Film Festival]

On March 24, one year after the film was completed, Direct Action premiered at the Cinema Reale Festival. The screening at 7:30 p.m. was packed. After the three-and-a-half-hour screening ended, even though it was nearly midnight, most of the audience stayed to participate in a Q&A session with the two directors. This is the second time the film has received rave reviews at an international film festival, following its world premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and its win for Best Film in the Encounters section[1]. In early June, when the European Parliament elections were coming out with worrying results, the film once again attracted attention at a screening and discussion of Direct Action at the Institute of Ethnography and Social Anthropology (IDEAS[2]) in Marseille.

Direct Action documents the environmentalist community in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, also known in France as ZADISTE, which means people occupying protected areas (ZAD[3]: Zone à défendre). In 1974, in order to adapt to the economic and urban development of France, Notre-Dame-des-Landes, north of Nanterre, was planned as an airport site. In the following fifty years, the movement against the construction of the airport continued. In 2008, the French Supreme Administrative Court decided to restart the airport construction project and officially announced the land expropriation, which once again attracted strong opposition from environmental groups. The following year, in order to oppose the expropriation of land for the development of commercial projects that are harmful to the environment, local farmers, environmentalists and other opponents set up tents on the airport's planned land and established a "protected area" autonomous society. The "protected area" also attracted more attention from the news media and society. After years of talks and conflicts with the government, ZADISTE achieved a preliminary victory: in early 2018, the then French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announced that the government had once again abandoned the airport construction plan. The people of the "protected area" did not leave, but turned this land into a test field for various social ideals: anti-capitalism, anti-globalization, democratic autonomy, collective decision-making, etc., and Notre-Dame-de-Land has therefore become synonymous with the current resistance and occupation movement in France.

“Seeing their victory and persistence shows us that utopia is still possible today,” Russell said in a discussion after the screening. “So I want to get to know this place and meet the people who live there.”

Stills from "Direct Action". (Photo credit: CASKFILMS)

Direct Action consists of 41 long shots, the longest of which is 10 minutes. The most common voice heard in media reports and records is the "resistance" of ZADISTE: opposing the neoliberal government of France, questioning the existing consumerist society, criticizing the government's tougher power over the police, opposing the current world order, especially the impact of the privatization of land and public sectors on the environment, ecology and society, etc. In 2012 and 2018, the government carried out armed expulsion of ZADISTE from Notre-Dame-de-Land several times. The direct conflict between the two sides highlighted ZADISTE's image as an environmental activist in media reports and on the Internet. In the nearly three and a half hours of recording of Direct Action, there are very few statements and defenses of ZADISTE's environmental protection or social concepts. The images record more of their observation and presentation of their daily "actions": plowing and planting rice, raising livestock and poultry, building houses, making bread, making labor tools, leisure activities (piercing ears, playing piano, playing chess, rock concerts), cooking and dining with neighbors, making and printing posters for parades and rallies, recording rap music, etc.

But the film is not an idyllic poem about city dwellers choosing rural life to escape from the world. These people came to Notre Dame de Langte and, together with the few remaining farmers in the area, defended the land. They also tried to use it as an experimental site to welcome all those who wanted to establish another social and lifestyle model, and to jointly build a collective self-managed society. In each long shot of the film, people gradually entered the daily work and life of the group of people in the "protected area". Everyone worked together to be self-sufficient and established channels for information dissemination, whether through propaganda posters, podcast platforms, rap music, or rallies and parades, in order to let the society understand the reasons and forms of the "protected area" in Notre Dame de Langte, and to popularize environmental protection knowledge. ZADISTE in Notre-Dame-de-Lands also pays attention to and supports people in other "protected areas" in France (such as the opponents who occupied the Sainte-Soline area in central-western France to protest the impact of a reservoir construction plan on public water resources and agriculture). Everyone uses this as a new form of collective resistance, no longer mainly protesting through traditional marches and demonstrations, but instead taking root in one place, protecting a piece of land, and trying to break away from the domination of globalized capitalism and neoliberalism in the world and build a new society.

Stills from "Direct Action". (Photo credit: CASKFILMS)

"(Seeking) a real life, not a poor imitation." In the recording studio built by the "protected area", a rapper in the film recorded the lyrics of the song. When environmental issues are pushed to the top agenda of major international forums, and when the "protected area" attracts more and more attention in French society, especially the younger generation in France, the spatial portrait of the "protected area" drawn by "Direct Action" allows ZADISTE's various concepts (political, environmental, economic, social, etc.) to permeate the quiet record observation of the image, which is concrete and full. Daily life and labor are no longer simple and meaningless repetition, but are closely linked to their vision, and are the process of their imagined social "possibilities" being put into practice bit by bit.

There are currently nearly 200 people living in Notre-Dame-de-Landes, from different social backgrounds. Direct Action was filmed in 2022-2023, and the two directors chose to use a 16mm movie film camera. Together with sound engineer Bruno Auzet, the crew consisted of three people, and each time they filmed, they had to carry a heavy camera tripod to move around the huge site of the "protected area", even when there was a conflict between protesters and riot police. Guillaume Caillou said: "We stayed in the 'protected area' for more than a year, with nearly 100 days of actual filming. We shot one shot a day (the longest was ten minutes: the time allowed by the length of the film), and used a total of eighty reels of film, accumulating about twelve hours of shooting material, and (the film) finally used one-third of it." During the one-year filming period, the two directors spent more time working and getting along with ZADISTE. "Every time we come back (to the city), we will print out the footage we shot. The next time we go back there to shoot, we will screen the footage from last time and watch it with the locals." Because of the two directors' choice of shooting equipment (they did not choose lightweight digital cameras), the camera is like another body in the space. Its speed of movement changes with the shooting situation, allowing the film shooting and recording itself to be integrated into the construction process of this "ideal society."

Stills from "Direct Action". (Photo credit: CASKFILMS)

Having been engaged in video creation for more than 20 years, American video artist Ben Russell (1976-) is well-known for his experimental video. His ethnographic films (also classified as visual anthropology in the academic field) break the conventional boundaries between documentary and experimental images, combining ethnographic notes, observational non-fiction images, and surrealist fantasy styles to use images to record and present different groups around the world: ethnic tribes, laborers, anarchists, etc. [4]. Guillaume Caillou (1978-) is a French artist, film director and producer who has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. His works combine different elements such as video installations, performances, and sound art to express and explore social and political topics. The two met at the New York Film Festival in 2009 and became close because of their interest and consensus in video practice. In 2012, Russell and Caillou collaborated on the silent short film Austerity Measures, which recorded the anarchist community Exàrcheia in Athens. In 2014, Guillaume Caillou's experimental documentary short film "Laborat" won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival in the same year. More than four years ago, Roussel came to Marseille, France to live, create and teach. In 2021, when he first heard about the community in the "reserve" in Notre-Dame-de-Landes, as a social citizen and artist, Roussel wanted to understand from his own perspective how this place was formed and what it meant to live in the "reserve". Because Caillou spent some time in Nanterre during his student days and had friends who lived in the "reserve", he offered to lead the way and serve as the producer of the film. The two people's shared experience in the "reserve" for more than a year made the film a natural joint work between them.

Still from "Direct Action". (Photo credit: Shellac)

Russell has always questioned the documentary genre, especially its so-called "objectivity". He prefers to use the descriptive power of film as a medium (space, duration, expression, movement, sound...) to bring viewers into the space constructed by each shot to feel and experience the people and things happening in front of them. In his own words: "It is not to simply record and present (the subject being filmed), but to try to explore the viewing 'experience' that can be generated through the film image itself, especially under the duration of a shot." This seemingly easy image expression method requires the director to do more preliminary preparation and in-depth observation of a place beyond the actual shooting. Considering some of Russell's image creations as "ethnographic" notes is also a "field investigation" work in a sense. However, the observation, recording and final film presentation under his lens are not the perspective of a curiosity seeker, but an attempt to see "self" from "others", and the limitations or prejudices in the inherent cognition that appear beyond empathy, thereby triggering the subject's thinking. Therefore, the editing of the film has become an important process of image thinking and writing. In 2017, Roussel's film Good Luck (2017, 143') recorded the daily mining life of miners in two places with completely different geographical, climatic and social environments: one is an underground copper mine in Serbia, and the other is an illegal gold mine in the tropical forest of Suriname. This work was installed at Documenta 2017 in Kassel, Germany in the same year, which can be said to be another good example of Roussel's image expression method.

Whether it is Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, and Robert Gardner, the pioneers or representatives of ethnographic documentary images, or Robert Kramer and Peter Watkins, who have conducted critical thinking on reality or history through documentary image experiments, or Chantal Akerman, Sharon Lockhart, and Frederick Wiseman, who have observed, recorded, and experimentally described society from the temporal dimension of images, or Andy Warhol, who has used the camera lens to gaze at the human face portrait... When Russell listed these artists he liked or admired, his perspective on image expression was already revealed. However, his preference for film shooting and long shots is not a model for art films, but more of an exploration of the relationship between images and time, and the relationship between images and "reality"/"truth" in image practice.

Still from "Direct Action". (Photo credit: Shellac)

Russell often uses "psychedelic ethnography" notes to define his recording method, because in the immersion of a long shot, the viewer's body enters the "land" in the "mirror". It is not to indulge in it, but to awaken one's own subjective viewing consciousness. Such a belief and practice in the characteristics of film images as a medium itself, in "Direct Action", what the audience shares in the "here and now" of the image may not be the yearning and longing for the ideal "utopia", but the free possibility of building a utopia that everyone is released in the "land" of the image.

Notes:

[1] The “Encounter” unit was established in 2020. As one of the important branches of the main competition unit of the Berlin Film Festival, the unit provides a platform for new image aesthetics, narrative and documentary images to be presented at the film festival.

[2] IDEAS - Institut d'ethnologie et d'anthropologie sociale, part of the Aix-Marseille University and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

[3] The term ZAD was coined in 1962 and originally referred to Zone d'Aménagement Différé. In 2010, environmentalists used a playful word game to challenge its formal meaning: they kept the abbreviation ZAD but changed the full name to "Zone à Défendre" (protected area) to make their position clear. The media and society gradually referred to people who camped in "protected areas" as "ZADISTE", and this term began to be used frequently. In 2016, "ZADISTE" was officially included in Le Petit Robert's dictionary.

[4] Russell’s personal website dimeshow.com contains a relatively complete record of his creative works, a large part of which can be viewed directly on the website.